Huawei? Is this a bad thing?

A few years ago, I had signed up for Verizon’s FIOS service. They trenched up my yard and put in this thick black cable into my utility room. Couple of days later, a technician came, spent half the day and installed this huge box inside my storage room (about 2 feet x 3 feet) which was in fact an Alcatel-Lucent Optical Network Terminal (ONT). In addition, I got this semi-large Wi-fi router which connected to my house coax cable plug.

I was excited and got about 10 Mbps on the download and just over 3 Mbps on the upload side. This was a lot better than Comcast and it was for about the same price ($50ish per month).

Moving to Hong Kong, I signed up with PCCW’s fiber to the home (FTTH) product. Guy comes out and strings this thread size optical cable directly into my home office. Cut the fiber optic cable with a cable cutter, slammed into a pocket trimmer to cut the end and then shoved it into a plastic little connector.

He then pushed the connector into this tiny little ONT from Huawei (about the width of a typical ball point pen, see picture) powered it up, lights blinked, LINK light came on and bang – I had download speeds of > 300 Mbps and upload speeds of > 200 Mbps. The entire price for this was about $45 a month.

The PCCW technician had struggled with the wiring, but was in and out in under 2 hours (including setting up the IPTV). So now I’m getting more from less compared to Verizon FIOS. If PCCW can give me this sort of blazing speed, I was left wondering why Verizon doesn’t offer the same?